Microprocessors are general purpose processors which provide high instruction throughputs in order to execute software running thereon, and can have a wide range of processing requirements depending on the particular software applications involved. A direct memory access (DMA) controller is often associated with a processor in order to take over the burden of transferring blocks of data from one memory or peripheral resource to another and to thereby improve the performance of the processor.
Many different types of processors are known, of which microprocessors are but one example. For example, Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) are widely used, in particular for specific applications, such as mobile processing applications. DSPs are typically configured to optimize the performance of the applications concerned and to achieve this they employ more specialized execution units and instruction sets. Particularly in applications such as mobile telecommunications, but not exclusively, it is desirable to provide ever increasing DSP performance while keeping power consumption as low as possible.
To further improve performance of a digital system, two or more processors can be interconnected. For example, a DSP may be interconnected with a general purpose processor in a digital system. The DSP performs numeric intensive signal processing algorithms while the general purpose processor manages overall control flow. The two processors communicate and transfer data for signal processing via shared memory.